To be fair CoreData was always a footgun as well

Agreed. SwiftData is terrible for anything more than like 2 "Models". I have a bunch of apps written with SwiftData and a bunch more with GRDB... I hate touching the SwiftData ones.

SwiftData is just a framework that you can choose to ignore and not use at all. Even CoreData. You can go straight to the source, and use some small layer on top of SQLite, and ignore that noise (most large apps just do that).

But, SwiftUI is being pushed as the way to do UI, and as a replacement for UIKIt/the future of apple, where it is not even near feature parity with it. That's the most troubling part of it.

I wished apple just made it as a Template Rendering framework, and integrated wit with UIKit, and just modernized UIKit a bit.

SQLiteData is the winner.